Guy J. Abel’s research while affiliated with The University of Hong Kong and other places

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Publications (76)


Patterns in internal migration worldwide
a, The standardized deviation of the regional out-migration rates from the country-specific mean for the last available census. The standardization ensures the comparability of the information across different country contexts and administrative settings. Regions with an above-average out-migration rate are shown in green and regions with a below-average out-migration rate are shown in purple. Countries coloured in grey are those not available in our database. b,c, Differences in regional out-migration rates by age and sex (n = 107,840) (b) and by education and sex (n = 107,840) (c). The boxplots show the median, interquartile ranges (IQR) and 1.5× IQR of the distributions across subnational regions.
Differences in migration impacts of drought and aridity across world regions
a, Differences in migration impacts by the geographical location of the subnational regions distinguishing effects across world regions (n = 107,840). The x axis shows the marginal effects and CI 90 (error bars) of a 1 s.d. increase in aridity levels on out-migration rates. The underlying full models are displayed in Supplementary Table 9. b, Modelled migration changes under a 4 °C global warming scenario based on projected changes in dryness in the regions until the end of the century⁴⁵. For the prediction, extended models (Supplementary Table 10) were used to estimate differential migration responses by world region and baseline aridity level (reference period 2001–2020) distinguishing between hyper-arid/arid, semi-arid, subhumid and humid regions. The derived predicted marginal effects were combined with the projected changes in the AI in the regions to explore potential impacts on internal migration.
The role of regional background characteristics in shaping migration responses to drought and aridity
a, The role of regional characteristics in influencing migration responses to drought and aridity. The y axis shows the marginal effects of a 1 s.d. change in the climate indicators on the out-migration rate. The figures rely on model estimates considering interactions between the climate indicators and the GDP per capita (measured in purchasing power parity; n = 77,226), the agricultural employment share (n = 68,134) and the urban population share (n = 50,340) in the regions of origin (Supplementary Tables 11–13). Increasing (decreasing) functions indicate increasing (decreasing) migration impacts with higher levels of the interaction variable. All models estimating interactions with agricultural employment and urban population share also control for interactions with GDP per capita to rule out confounding wealth effects. b, The results of interaction models which interact the climate indicators with regional deviations in GDP per capita (n = 77,202), agricultural employment (n = 97,813) and urban population share (n = 70,829) from the country-specific mean (Supplementary Tables 14–16). Considering standardized deviations as opposed to the overall level values of the variables allows testing for differences in migration responses by within-country differences in wealth, agricultural dependency and urban population. Solid lines show the results where interaction variables refer to deviations in origin areas. Dashed lines show the results for deviations in prospective destination areas.
Migration impacts by different population subgroups in more and less developed countries
a, Estimated differences in migration responses for men (green dots and whiskers) and women (blue dots and whiskers) in different age groups (y axis) for populations in more (n = 36,348) and less developed countries (n = 69,113). b, Differences in migration responses for men and women by International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) levels (y axis) in more (n = 35,973) and less developed countries (n = 67,215). The x axis shows the marginal effects and CI 90 (error bars) of a 1 s.d. increase in drought and aridity measured with the four climate indicators. The classification into more and less developed countries is based on data from the UN World Population Prospects⁶⁹.
Drought and aridity influence internal migration worldwide
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

October 2024

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205 Reads

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1 Citation

Nature Climate Change

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Guy Abel

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Marco Percoco

While the effects of climatic changes on migration have received widespread public and scientific attention, comparative evidence for their influence on internal migration worldwide remains scarce. Here we use census-based data from 72 countries (1960–2016) to analyse 107,840 migration flows between subnational regions. We find that increased drought and aridity have a significant impact on internal migration, particularly in the hyper-arid and arid areas of Southern Europe, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and South America. Migration patterns are shaped by the wealth, agricultural dependency and urbanization of both origin and destination areas with migration responses being stronger in rural and predominantly agricultural areas. While overall climatic effects on migration are stronger in richer countries, we observe higher out-migration from poorer towards wealthier regions within countries. Furthermore, age and education groups respond differently to climatic stress, highlighting distinct mobility patterns of population subgroups across different geographic contexts.

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The Migration Intersections Grid: An Organizing Framework for Migration Research in and through the Twenty-first Century

September 2024

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52 Reads

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1 Citation

International Migration Review

For this special issue of the International Migration Review, we develop and provide a comprehensive organizing framework, the Migration Intersections Grid (MIG), to inform and guide migration research in and through the remainder of the twenty-first century. We motivate our work by conducting a high-level scoping review of summaries and syntheses of different directions of travel in migration research over time. Informed by these results, we then identify and describe 12 components that constitute the MIG, which, as we later discuss, is an interactive intersectional organizing framework. Finally, we illustrate the MIG's interactive intersectional nature by applying it to several areas of migration research where a comprehensive organizing framework of this sort is needed to address existing and emerging issues and questions now and in the coming decades.



Integrating Traditional and Social Media Data to Predict Bilateral Migrant Stocks in the European Union

May 2024

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84 Reads

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3 Citations

International Migration Review

Although up-to-date information on the nature and extent of migration within the European Union (EU) is important for policymaking, timely and reliable statistics on the number of EU citizens residing in or moving across other member states are difficult to obtain. In this paper, we develop a statistical model that integrates data on EU migrant stocks using traditional sources such as census, population registers and Labour Force Survey, with novel data sources, primarily from the Facebook Advertising Platform. Findings suggest that combining different data sources provides near real-time estimates that can serve as early warnings about shifts in EU mobility patterns. Estimated migrant stocks match relatively well to the observed data, despite some overestimation of smaller migrant populations and underestimation for larger migrant populations in Germany and the United Kingdom. In addition, the model estimates missing stocks for migrant corridors and years where no data are available, offering timely now-casted estimates.



World’s human migration patterns in 2000–2019 unveiled by high-resolution data

September 2023

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500 Reads

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21 Citations

Nature Human Behaviour

Despite being a topical issue in public debate and on the political agenda for many countries, a global-scale, high-resolution quantification of migration and its major drivers for the recent decades remained missing. We created a global dataset of annual net migration between 2000 and 2019 (~10 km grid, covering the areas of 216 countries or sovereign states), based on reported and downscaled subnational birth (2,555 administrative units) and death (2,067 administrative units) rates. We show that, globally, around 50% of the world’s urban population lived in areas where migration accelerated urban population growth, while a third of the global population lived in provinces where rural areas experienced positive net migration. Finally, we show that, globally, socioeconomic factors are more strongly associated with migration patterns than climatic factors. While our method is dependent on census data, incurring notable uncertainties in regions where census data coverage or quality is low, we were able to capture migration patterns not only between but also within countries, as well as by socioeconomic and geophysical zonings. Our results highlight the importance of subnational analysis of migration—a necessity for policy design, international cooperation and shared responsibility for managing internal and international migration.



Figure 1. Double reported European migration flows statistics before and after European Commission Regulation No. 862/2007.
Closing disparities between European sending and receiving international migration flow data

December 2022

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26 Reads

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1 Citation

Evidence-based policies to monitor and manage migration flows require accurate data. Data collection on international migration flow statistics is based on a range of data sources and measures. Discrepancies in reported migration flow data are apparent when comparing flow statistics from receiving countries on the number of arriving migrants by their country of origin with statistics from sending countries on the number of departing migrants by their country of destination. In recent decades the relative incompleteness and non-comparability in reported migration statistics have motivated a number of initiatives to improve data in European countries. In this paper we illustrate graphically the discrepancies between sending and receiving migration flow statistics provided to Eurostat by European countries. We find a reduction of the discrepancies between receiving and sending migration flow data after the implementation of regulations to improve the availability and comparability of migration data.


The development of internal migration flow patterns in Japan

November 2022

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71 Reads

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2 Citations

Population decline is expected to continue to be a prominent feature of Japanese demography in future decades. Internal migration plays a significant role in dictating the intensity of population decline at the regional level. In this paper we visualize inter-prefecture internal migration flows between the eight regions of Japan in 2020 using a chord diagram to show the relative scales of the origin–destination migration flows between each region. In addition, we use an animated series of chord diagrams to show the development of internal migration between 1954 and 2020. We fix the axis of the sectors of the chord diagram in the animation to illustrate the rapid growth and then slow decline (post-1972) in the regional migration system, as well as the interruption in the movement patterns during 2011, due to the Great East Japan Earthquake.


Chord diagrams of estimated (a) female (left) and (b) male (right) migration flows during 2015–2020 based on the Closed Demographic Accounting - Pseudo Bayesian methods. Direction of the flow is indicated by the arrowhead. The size of the flow is indicated by the width of the arrow at its base. Numbers on the circumferential axis, which give the size of migration flows, are in millions of individuals per five-year period. The margins of each regional sector are set to their maximum values over all five-year periods separately for each sex.
Female and male total migration flows (in millions per five-year period), corresponding crude migration rates (migrants per thousand people in the population per five-year period) and proportions of migrants of each sex for five-year periods between 1990–1995 and 2015–2020 based on six estimation methods.
Outward, return and transit total migration flows (in millions of people per five-year period) by sex, corresponding crude migration rates (migrants per thousand people in the population per five-year period) and proportions of migrants of each sex for five-year periods between 1990–1995 and 2015–2020 based on three estimation methods.
Correlations between female and male estimated migration flows during five-year periods from 1990–1995 to 2015–2020 from six estimation methods with constructed equivalent reported five-year migration flows based on the DEMIG C2C collection and Eurostat.
Correlations between estimated migration flows during five-year periods from 1990–1995 to 2015–2020 from six estimation methods with constructed five-year equivalent reported migration flows from five collections of migration statistics. Top panels are based on estimates from the sum of female and male migration flows described in this article. Bottom panels are based on estimates without disaggregation by sex.
Bilateral international migration flow estimates updated and refined by sex

April 2022

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328 Reads

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21 Citations

Scientific Data

Females and males often migrate at different rates. Official data on sex-specific international migration flows are missing for most countries, prohibiting comparative measures to identify and address inequalities. Here we use six methods to estimate male and female five-year bilateral migration flows between 200 countries from 1990 to 2020. We validate the estimates from each method through correlations of several migration measures with equivalent reported statistics in countries that collect flow data. We find that the Pseudo-Bayesian demographic accounting method performs consistently better than the other estimation methods for both female and male estimated flows. The estimates from all methods indicate a decline in the share of female migration flows from 1990–1995 to 2005–2010 followed by a recovery over the decade since 2010.


Citations (58)


... Climate-related displacement is a growing issue in Africa, where many migrants are forced to move due to worsening environmental conditions such as droughts, floods, and desertification. When other adaptation options fail or are no longer viable, households may resort to migration as a means of coping with adverse climate impacts [74] [75] [76]. Climate change is significantly altering migration patterns across the globe, particularly in regions highly susceptible to extreme weather events, such as North Africa. ...

Reference:

Climate Change Impact on Cereal Production in Northern Africa: A Comprehensive Modeling and Control Approach
Drought and aridity influence internal migration worldwide

Nature Climate Change

... More recently, [36] used geolocated Twitter data to estimate outmigration from Venezuela. [37] use geolocated data from the Facebook Advertising Platform to generate real-time estimates of mobility in the European Union and [38] use the same data to capture daily population displacement in Ukraine. In addition, [39] use Facebook data to model the impacts of the United Kingdom's Brexit on out-migration. ...

Integrating Traditional and Social Media Data to Predict Bilateral Migrant Stocks in the European Union

International Migration Review

... This, in turn, might lead to high inaccuracies in the results. Over the past decade, an increasing number of subnational or gridded datasets for various socioeconomic variables have been published, including data on migration patterns 4 , urbanisation 5 , gross national income (GNI) per capita and income inequality (Gini coefficient) 6 , and the human development index (HDI) 7,8 . ...

World’s human migration patterns in 2000–2019 unveiled by high-resolution data

Nature Human Behaviour

... We used a logistic regression to estimate the parameters allowing us to predict the probability for a woman to give birth, depending on her age group (five-year), level of education, whether her household has access to electricity, to modern cooking fuels and whether she lives in a rural or urban area. We chose this set of independent variables as they have been shown to be the most influential in explaining fertility variations (Lutz, Butz, and Samir 2014 ;Belmin et al. 2022 ;Lerch 2017 ;Adhikari, Lutz, and KC 2023). The dependent variable is whether the women gave birth in the last year. ...

World Population & Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century: An Overview
  • Citing Article
  • September 2017

... Previous studies on macro trends in internal migration in Japan have primarily used aggregated interprefectural flow data by age group and sex (Fielding & Ishikawa, 2021;Hauer et al., 2020;Ishikawa & Fielding, 1998;Kakinuma & Abel, 2022). In studies focusing on age-specific patterns, the results are presented as migration age profiles and a migration effectiveness index based on all flow patterns at the national level (Ishikawa, 2020). ...

The development of internal migration flow patterns in Japan

... al., 2023). Sex-specific universal movement streams have been found to differ over time, with a decrease within the share of female relocation streams taken after a recuperation (Abel & Cohen, 2022). Sex imbalance plays a critical part in forming the relocation encounters of ladies (Ena, 2022). ...

Bilateral international migration flow estimates updated and refined by sex

Scientific Data

... This phenomenon has been documented extensively, including in relation to flooding (Chen et al., 2017;Chen & Mueller, 2019;Ocello et al., 2015), storms (Pajaron & Vasquez, 2020;Robalino et al., 2015), drought (Quiñones et al., 2021), and temperature and precipitation fluctuations (Beine & Parsons, 2017;Nguyen, 2021). In addition, in some cases, excess rainfall may beneficially affect agricultural production and related labor needs, employment, and income, thus reducing migration pressures (Call & Gray, 2020;Mueller et al., 2020;Nguyen, 2021), while in other contexts higher rainfall has been found to increase household income and thus provide resources to support migration (Abel et al., 2022;Cottier & Salehyan, 2021). ...

Climatic Shocks and Internal Migration: Evidence from 442 Million Personal Records in 64 Countries
  • Citing Book
  • January 2022

... Using data taken from the International Migrant Stock 2020 database, the geographic flux of female migrants (aged 10 to 49, then generating MHW) was assessed taking into account both their origin and destination locations. The average volume per woman was found to be 1.5 Kg worldwide [21].In France, more than 25% of women experienced menstruation precariousness at some point in their lives, primarily due to the menstrual protection products utilised. Menstrual precariousness is regarded by 76% of French women as a public health problem [1]. ...

Migration stocks and flows: data concepts, availability and comparability
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 2021

... This is the same data used in Abel et al. 8 and the estimates we use in this article. The statistical method used to develop these estimates is built on the work by Azose and Raftery 48 , which builds on the work by Abel 83,84 . This data is developed by first gathering data on country-level migration stocks, desegregated by country of birth based on administrative and United Nations records. ...

Estimates of Global Bilateral Migration Flows by Gender Between 1960 and 2015
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

... Some studies blend expert opinion with scenarios for migration. Sander, Abel & Riosmena (2013) brought together experts in social, economic, and environmental migration. Expert views were obtained through a structured online survey and an expert group meeting (which is a diversion from the original Delphi method and follows Abel et al. 2013 approach) on thematic areas including economic, demographic, climatic, policy and costs impacts on migration. ...

The Future of International Migration: Developing Expert-Based Assumptions for Global Population Projections